Vietnam and South Korea have signed twelve agreements covering security, energy infrastructure, and nuclear power plants following a leaders' meeting in Hanoi. A central achievement of the talks was reaching a substantive consensus on restarting Vietnam's nuclear power program. Furthermore, Vietnamese Party General Secretary and President To Lam emphasized, "Both countries are committed to continuously facilitating the import and export of each other's goods and opening their markets to achieve the goal of $150 billion in bilateral trade by 2030."
The memoranda of understanding include cooperation between the Vietnam Oil and Gas Group (Petrovietnam) and Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) in nuclear power plant development, as well as a financing agreement for the nuclear project signed by Petrovietnam, KEPCO, the Export-Import Bank of Korea, and the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation. This marks a significant shift in energy policy for Vietnam, which suspended its nuclear energy plans in 2016 due to funding and safety concerns. The move aims to address the country's power shortage bottleneck, which constrains industrial development, by introducing South Korea's advanced nuclear power construction expertise.
To Lam added that Vietnam welcomes investments from South Korean businesses in key sectors, including infrastructure development, smart cities, hyperscale AI data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, and nuclear power projects. According to Vietnamese government data, South Korea is Vietnam's largest investment partner, second-largest source of tourists, and third-largest trading partner, with bilateral trade reaching $89.5 billion in 2024.
In response to current global tensions surrounding mineral resources, the two nations decided to establish a linkage mechanism for critical mineral supply chains. This cooperation focuses particularly on developing Vietnam's abundant rare earth resources, with South Korea providing advanced refining technology in exchange for stable upstream supply. This is intended to reduce the dependence of South Korea's semiconductor and electric vehicle battery industries on single sources of supply.
It is noteworthy that just two weeks prior to this summit, Samsung Electronics announced plans to invest $4 billion in building a chip packaging plant in northern Vietnam. As the largest foreign investor in Vietnam, Samsung is continuously expanding its business footprint in the country. Data from Samsung Vietnam shows that the company's revenue accounted for 13% of Vietnam's GDP in 2024. Samsung and its global peers are accelerating expansion to meet the surging demand for chips from data centers and AI devices. The South Korean conglomerate, an early investor in Vietnam, established its first factory in Bac Ninh province in 2008.
South Korea has long been committed to expanding trade cooperation with Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations, diversifying production bases and export markets to hedge against the impacts of the China-US trade war. However, the agreements signed this time represent not only an upgrade in the quality of bilateral trade but also a significant microcosm of the restructuring of the East Asian industrial division of labor system. This signals an acceleration over the next decade in the shift of high-tech, high-value-added industrial chains within Southeast Asia towards a model centered on "South Korea-Vietnam cooperation."